Member-only story
I’ve been trying to do this creator thing since September while holding a part-time job at a digital marketing agency, about 4 levels junior to what I was previously on. I’m doing this 4 days a week to pay the bills (just about) and then spending weekday mornings, Fridays, and Sundays working on my own thing.
I’m consulting on content marketing, SEO, and buyer psychology as my ‘side-hustle’. And I’ve also been writing on Medium, LinkedIn, and now on Twitter.
The hardest part about this has to be feeling like you’re the only one who hasn’t got it figured out. Like everyone else’s crisis is coming to an end, but you still haven’t got your sh*t together. And when you’ve got a wife and child to think about it get’s very real very fast.
So why do I still think this is the right thing to do? Because even though I was earning over $100k a year in my previous corporate job, it was nowhere near enough to get me out of wedding debt, support my wife, help my family back home in Pakistan, and save for a house. This forced me to take a couple of risks in my corporate career that didn’t work out.
I joined a startup in 2018 that failed after 9 months. I then joined a scale-up sports marketing agency that was the most toxic work environment I’ve ever worked in.
Why the f*ck would I want to go back to that life if it doesn’t even solve my financial problems? Suffering is inevitable in life, but as Mark Manson says, we can choose our suffering. If I’m going to be anxious and suffer anyway, let me at least have a shot at creating the life I want, rather than trying to keep running on this middle-class treadmill.
